Clarence “Morgan” Morgan is an American abstract painter whose work spans painting, drawing, printmaking, and an ongoing reflective writing practice. Rooted in gesture, intuition, and process, his work explores shifting relationships between order and improvisation. Through pattern, repetition, and fluid mark-making, Morgan examines perceptual experience and the ways visual systems echo larger questions of time, space, and the natural and cosmic world.
Morgan’s paintings, drawings, and prints have been exhibited nationally and internationally, with works represented in numerous public and private collections including the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Walker Art Center, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum. His recent and current representation includes GF Contemporary (Santa Fe) and Todd Bockley Gallery (Minneapolis).
He has produced editions at Tamarind Institute (Albuquerque), Highpoint Center for Printmaking (Minneapolis), Brandywine Workshop (Philadelphia), and the Patton Printmaking Studio at Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Snowmass,
Colorado). Morgan has received major fellowships from the Bush Foundation, Jerome Foundation, McKnight Foundation, and the Minnesota State Arts Board, among others.
In 2025 Morgan was selected as an Invited Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, a residency that extends his ongoing investigations into abstraction, phenomenology, cosmology, and the embodied experience of mark-making. His parallel writing practice—composed of notes, essays, and studio reflections—further articulates the metaphysical and perceptual concerns that inform his visual work.
Morgan has held teaching and visiting artist appointments at numerous institutions including Yale University, Cooper Union, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Stanford University, and the University of Minnesota, where he served as Department Chair from 2004 to 2010 and is currently Head of Drawing/Painting. He lives and works in Chicago.
Free and open to the public.
In addition to public presentations, artists in the UCLS series have important interactions with UNCG students, such as holding masterclasses, talkback sessions, and seminars, often just hours before performing on stage. Thanks to a grant from The Cemala Foundation, some of these artists also work with K-12 students in the Guilford County Schools.
